Free Software Activities in November 2018

Kurt Kremitzki — Wed, 19 Dec 2018 05:20:10 GMT

Intro

Welcome to another of my monthly summaries on my work in the free software world. My mission is to make engineering and science available for everyone, and Debian, the Universal Operating System, is my weapon of choice.

I received some feedback on my last post that I made it seem I would be stepping away from my role maintaining FreeCAD and other packages on the Debian Science Team, which was an unfortunate miscommunication on my part. Mainly, I just would like to reduce the proportion of my overall free software time on it, from its current amount, nearly 100%, to a roughly even 1/3rd split between Debian Science, FreeCAD, and PostCAD. The latter is a promising personal project to make an OpenCASCADE-powered CAD extension for PostgreSQL, bringing support for CAD file formats, datatypes, and algorithms to the powerful Postgres ecosystem, similar to what PostCAD has done for geospatial analysis. This could serve as a backend for both FreeCAD in the short term, and in the long term, it could power a web-based version of FreeCAD, perhaps with some Django-powered middleware serving a REST API for some WebGL-based frontend.

So, besides summarizing my work this month, I also plan to give a synopsis on my Debian packaging, for both what's in-progress and on my wishlist. As you'll see, it's quite extensive. My hope is that by whittling away at both lists, my Debian Science work can focus more on maintenance of existing packages, and free up some time for other things.

Transition for coin3

Coin3D is a scene graph library and a fundamental part of FreeCAD. Unfortunately, it hasn't had a release since 2011, but development has been picking up recently, so it's likely that a release is not too far off. Even without a formal release, several improvements have been made including CMake support, so it's time to prepare a transition in advance of the Debian 10 release. Luckily, Leo Palomo-Avellaneda has taken the initiative of getting this transition started.

Currently, the new Coin3D package is available in Debian Experimental as we prepare the reverse-dependencies to build against it. For FreeCAD, we directly depend on Pivy, which are Python bindings for Coin. Pivy, in turn, depends on Coin and SoQt, which is a Qt GUI component toolkit library for Coin. A pre-release version of SoQt is also being packaged since, like Coin, CMake support has been added, as well as support for Qt 5.

Unfortunately, I've been grinding my gears on building Pivy against the new Coin and SoQt for a good part of this month, which is especially troublesome since FreeCAD's transition to Python 3 is blocked by the upload of a new Pivy, which I prepared earlier this year.

With any luck, I'll be able to help Leo finish the Coin and SoQt transition and have Pivy prepared in December.

Gmsh Update

Gmsh is a 3D finite element mesh generator with built-in pre- and post-processing facilities. It's also one of the main meshers used by FreeCAD's Finite Element Modeling Workbench, besides Netgen.

Currently Debian has Gmsh 3.0.6, but a new major version was released in August. I've already prepared this new major version for testing in FreeCAD's Community Extras PPA, but I hadn't cleaned up the packaging yet to submit to Debian. However, in November, there were two point releases, 4.0.5 and 4.0.6, so I wasn't able to complete this work this month, but I'm sure it'll be done in early December.

One major piece of information regarding Gmsh 4 is a change in the API: the libjava-gmsh3 package in Debian was never meant to be a public API, and so Gmsh upstream has requested that we no longer ship it. To offset this, there have been refinements for the actual public API, which officially comes in C, Python 3 and (new) Julia flavors. However, I haven't found much information on Julia packaging in Debian, so I'll likely hold off on that package.

PySide 2 Rebuild & PPA Plans

Since FreeCAD is an LGPL-licensed Qt project, we must use PySide and not PyQt to do Qt things with Python. Because of this, the FreeCAD migration to Qt 5 on Debian was blocked by the packaging of PySide 2, which was completed by Freexian SARL over the summer. In Debian, we now have a Qt 5-enabled FreeCAD, although our daily builds PPA is still using Qt 4.

Besides the Qt 4->5 transition, we're also finishing up a Python 2->3 transition. At the end of the summer I published a freecad-python3 package in the PPA which also used Qt 5. However, it wasn't really fully usable, moreso a proof-of-concept that such a build indeed buildable.

At this point, the Debian FreeCAD package has begun to diverge from the FreeCAD PPAs; besides Qt 5 builds not being available currently, the Debian package has also been split into several packages (e.g. libfreecad, freecad-common, etc. packages) in order to better comply with Debian Policy and the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.

So, there's a bit of work to do to catch the PPAs up. First, the package split needs to be done. Then, I need to upload an alternative freecad-daily package for Qt 5 builds, separate from Python 3. Once that is done and has undergone some testing, freecad-daily can be replaced by it, and it in turn can be replaced by a freecad-python3 package for further testing. Since FreeCAD's 0.18 release is imminent, I'll need to get this taken care of during December, so stay tuned.

Packaging in Progress

My first packaging list is all the software I've already started packaging. For some, it's almost complete, and for others, I've only just begun.

The purpose of these lists is not to give status updates, but to announce what all I'm interested in to anyone reading this, and to give an idea of how much packaging work I have in mind to improve this usage of Debian.

Biosystems Engineering Blog (Posts about postcad)

Free Software Activities in November 2018

Intro

Sponsors

Transition for coin3

Gmsh Update

PySide 2 Rebuild & PPA Plans

Packaging in Progress

cantera

Homepage, GitHub

coolprop

Homepage, GitHub

elmerfem

Homepage, GitHub

if97

PDF Standard, GitHub

ifcopenshell

Homepage, GitHub

ifcplusplus

Homepage, GitHub

opencamlib

Homepage, GitHub

openvoronoi

Homepage, GitHub

projectchrono

Homepage, GitHub

smesh

GitHub

xcfem

Homepage, GitHub

Wishlist Packages

2geom

Homepage, GitLab

bimserver

Homepage, GitHub

cadquery

Homepage, GitHub

libreoffice-code-highlighter

Homepage, GitHub

lib3mf

Homepage, GitHub

muesli

Homepage, BitBucket

cling

Homepage, GitHub

dpkg-licenses

GitHub

landlab

Homepage, GitHub

nikola

Homepage, GitHub

osifont

Homepage, GitHub

pigpio

Homepage, GitHub

piscope

Homepage, GitHub

pyocct

GitHub

pyray

GitHub

quarter

BitBucket

rebound

Homepage, GitHub

sqlint

GitHub

swatmodel

Homepage, GitHub

wger

Homepage, GitHub

Conclusion